As someone who's been interested in tracker defeating since that became a thing around 25 years ago, I'm just a little concerned that something like this AdNauseum -- if ever adopted significantly -- could invite blowback that also hits more conventional tracker blocking, or other current liberties.
Not making certain HTTP requests seems to be protected right now. However, click fraud, with which this might be conflated, seems to be a very different matter.
Imagine this being used to justify hamfisted legal restrictions on how everyone's browsers may behave. Or used as a reason or pretext to effectively force even more invasive user identity requirements or device attestation. (Which, history suggests, will then be abused for more nefarious and societally dangerous purposes.)
I like this reasoning. Either we voluntarily stop behaving in a way that advertisers don’t like or we will be forced to stop behaving in ways that advertisers don’t like. The only likely or rational future is that we all stop acting in ways advertisers don’t like, one way or another.
We may be best served by proactively rethinking all of our computing habits to make sure they more closely align with AdSense’s goals for uh… our benefit.
I’ve seen an incomplete proposal from an adtech CEO that suggests we have a global user ID that we set somewhere, somehow (the tech details aren’t worked out, but the data would be stored centrally in some ad watchdog type org, something like the PCI-DSS Council), and publishers could offer varying levels of access to their site for varying levels of access to your data for advertisements. The user would be able to remove access to the data from any publisher at any time, delete all their data at any time, and they’d be able to centrally manage their data for all sites.
His argument for began with essentially what you said, this is going to happen whether we like it or not, so let’s get ahead of it and create a system that leaves the power in the end-user’s hands.
That’s not going to happen in the current structure where Google basically owns advertising because of Chrome’s market share. Google will control things.
Surreptitiously hijacking people's expensive PCs and network connections that they pay the bills for to download ads that they don't want to see... not theft.
“click fraud”? That is very very far fetched. I’m just following links your website serves me. If you don’t like it you don’t have to serve your ads to me.
> use a domain that you can move to any provider and keep a backup of you're email.
And which ones are those? Once I've selected the right provider, how do I reliably implement my backups?
> If you put yourself in a place where someone can take everything from you than it's a real risk that they might.
I'll just go ahead and stop using every major software product created in the last decade.
Despite my sarcasm you're not wrong, I agree completely with what you're saying. But to follow your advice is not easy, especially for the average user. IMO it's a problem with the way software is made, and while many of us are vaguely aware of the problem, there's been little progress towards solving it.
You buy a domain from wherever, you set it up on Google like anyone can, and not just techies, normies get domains all the time, then, you use pop and download your email.
Is that more than someone might think of? Maybe, but it's not that far fetched if it's something you want to do.
What's hard to get a normal person to do is distrust Google or Facebook et. al.
Edit to point out that normal people who are marginalized by society actually know about this stuff and already do things like this, like having pre-warmed backup accounts on social media platforms avoiding most major banking platforms or diversifying payments platforms to limit impact and hosting their own websites.
There are a lot of simple things you can do to become less dependent and people who tent to find themselves in those places can seek these things out.
The reason progress isn't made is _because_ the casual experience is so good. Gmail works very well, at least the average (read: compliant) user. Therefore, the system is designed so that it works well for said average user, and so they do not have any incentive to pay for a more "difficult" to use product, which enhances an aspect that they don't care (or know to care) about. That is, until they get hit by an issue (after all, you're average until you're not). But since their numbers are still overwhelmingly small, there's also no political arena for which this can become legislated to make it work.
Two things. With an email software like Thunderbird you can download a local copy of your mail and backup that. And you should own the domain name of your private email address, even if you forward it to gmail. Because that way, if gmail locks you out or you just don’t like them any more, you’ll be happy that no one has to update your email address.
This is true, but it's a lot harder to piss of a registrar than someone like google that has its fingers in all sorts of pies. Your registrar doesn't necessarily care if you're running and ad blocker or if Google thinks your account should be suspendeded because they don't like your app in the play store.
Stormfront has had its domain name taken away by its registrar, and I believe kiwifarms did as well (cloudflare says they provided ddos protection but not hosting, but other sites I see claim that cloudflare was also their dns provider)
While you're at it, why not just not use the internet? And let's ditch the cellphone too because a lot of tracking is happening through them.
> If you put yourself in a place where someone can take everything from you than it's a real risk that they might.
You're exactly right, but absolutely wrong. We've had this conversation about creep for a few decades but it still happened. It is technically possible to live in the modern world without the internet and a cell phone, but it is not a realistic expectation. In fact, removing even one of the tech giants from your life results in a considerable disruption of your life[0].
You're right that people need to make individual choices, but you are missing the fact that a collection of people making choices is called a society. Those decisions have been made by our less tech literate friends and family. The ones we've failed to educate, using our expertise to inform those that are not in the domain. To fail to learn to effectively communicate and warn of the real dangers of what is happening. The truth is that no matter what decisions we make, we are still subject to the decisions of our society. Saying "you should have made better choices" is simply victim blaming. Unless you have been a hermit for the last 30 years and plan to continue this route -- clearly you're not since you're reading this -- then your individual choices were simply not enough. There is a larger game at play and you are still subject to society if you wish to participate. And let's be real, not participating comes with dire consequences and a complete abandonment of much of what it means to be human. So that's not a realistic choice or expectation. We need to think deeper, as its the only way we can solve this problem. It's easy to be dismissive and come to simple conclusions that make a nice pretty bow, but our world is incredibly complex and nothing is as simple as it appears. Anything you think is simple is simply something you do not understand sufficiently.
It is not too late, it never will be. But it is like planting a tree: the best time was 20 years ago but the second best is now. The effects compound, in both directions. So I'll repeat what I've been trying to for most of my life, we need to make meaningful action and stop this spying. The will only control more of our lives if we continue this route and a "high tech-low life" future isn't an unlikely outcome. It's far more likely than seeing AGI, and AGI could only accelerate such a trajectory (it similarly could liberate us, which is why I research it. But there is real danger and we must not hide that fact)
> Background noise in general disappears this week because YouTube, Apple Music, and our Echo are all banned—as are Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu, because they rely on AWS and the Google Cloud to get their content to users.
Now, if you eliminate AWS, Azure and Google Cloud from your life, you could turn on the Airplane mode as well as the public cloud powers up a large part of today's web, either directly or as a dependency. But there is a ton of difference between using Google's services and visiting a website powered by GCP.
That would be funny since the only thing I use my gmail account for is YouTubeTV. I guess forcing them to save me $72 a month is an option I had not considered.
It's only far fetched if you look at it rationally. Whereas if ads pay your salary, it's obviously click fraud. GP is describing an angle that some people might take for personal benefit, not an actual argument.
It’s not obvious even if ads pay your salary. Adtech is mostly real-time bidding, and the bid is for the impression, not the conversion. Adtech wins either way.
This tool doesn't in any way meet the legal definition of fraud. Any if everyone working on online advertising loses their paychecks then that is an acceptable outcome.
Yep, people toss the word fraud around, and lawyers love to use it to scare the shit out of the opposition, but it's a very high bar to meet legally. An automated tool that clicked randomly on web page elements for no financial gain to the user or supplier of said tool would in no way reach the threshold of fraud.
Except a few walled gardens, like search and social media (FB and Google do not share much of your data with advertisers, and nearly none with other adtech companies), ads are bought through real-time bidding. And the bid is paid regardless of how you respond to the ad.
The majority of ads are bought this way, so your click does not harm the advertisers whose ad would otherwise have been blocked. This could impact the relative value of the publisher’s website, but the industry in general is not overly inhibited by ad-blocking, so I don’t think this extension would have much impact in any sense.
YouTube refers to it as "invalid click activity" when they demonitize channels for it. In some instances, fans of one channel/creator have been known to brigade the channel of someone they don't like and click the ads many times, which YouTube will assume is evidence of the target trying to artificially inflate their own revenue.
> force even more invasive user identity requirements or device attestation
I think those are both coming. All the major forces are aligned against users: governments, content holders, advertisers, police, and authoritarians everywhere. It's inevitable unless we take the power back.
You send a detailed list of what's being offered, and expected. I return a request for exactly what I'd like to get ... and nothing else ... along with my list of what I'm willing to send in return.
If you don't like my list, deny my request. If you deliberately send me something I didn't checkmark, or change your stated expectations, I'll refuse any more of your traffic.
Thanks for pointing out soulseek, hadn't heard of it, will be checking into it.
But I meant it in a much more general sense, for most of what happens on the net .... built-in. A LOT of sites want me to enable services that I don't want to deal with. I don't want google-analytics, or apis, or syndication. A LOT of sites want me to subscribe with a long list of personal information. Not happening. A LOT of sites want me to watch advertising; I quit cable-TV long ago.
I could just auto-'nope' to all of those right up front and they could just - reply 'nope' and go away. All recorded once and for all, never knock on that door again.
uBlockO helps with some of that, but things shouldn't be that complicated, it wastes my time, it wastes a huge amount of bandwidth ... and data center energy needs. Enshittification.
Wouldn't have to be all-or-nothing; there could be maybes. By 'BBS-simple' I mean an up-front human-to-human negotiation style. I download something, if the sysop is looking for something and I have it to share, they'll get it, guaranteed, nothing else. Micropayments for their time? Wish we could do that.
If I click a link on a specific topic, and with that query I auto-communicate 1) what I don't want (images say, or a subscription pop-up, or an unwanted 3MB list of all their other features, services, plans, site history) and 2) what they're looking for) ... they could just say 'no go', or we could bargain. The machines can keep track.
I really share your concerns and take your side, but one could also ask what harm is being done here, other than messing with the stats by letting code perform an action a human could do.
Something along these lines: We're not asking to get these clickable ads, so if they're sent to us, we might as well just have a script click them.
It's doubtful if this is really click fraud, since we're in no contract relationship to the ad platform, unlike the one who uses the platform. Click fraud could be defined as commercially interested parties generating false clicks for profit, either the ad platform or the competition creating these clicks to charge for clicks which never happened or the clients for whichever reason.
But from my point of view I'd rather not do any of this as a tracker blocker, you never know if then a capable lawyer meets a bad judge and suddenly uBlock Origin will be (absurdly) ruled as an illegal piece of software.
I suspect the motivation for many to install uBO was to reduce resource abuse (and visual noise). I'm sceptical it would ever be adopted significantly.
I'm not sure if AdNauseam can be adapted for autonomous use on a Raspberry Pi, it's unlikely it would replace uBO for me, however an ad-clicking machine running on a Pi is appealing.
This would likely just create a massive backlash. When you look at most of any survey on things like privacy [1] and other topics, people are not apathetic in the least. Most people know their data is being harvested, misused, and exploited. But because this all happens pretty much invisibly, people feel powerless. Trying to create very visible and ham-fisted laws forcing people to engage in behavior that most all of us are opposed to, beyond any typical partisanship, would be amazing in the unified backlash it would create.
I also don't even really think this would fly in DC. Advertisers are certainly indulged because they provide an endless mountain of surveillance information to spook organizations, and can also be used to try to influence elections. But most politicians are people too, and with acts like this you'd be passing laws to piss on yourself, your family, and your friends as much as the rest of society.... for the sake of advertisers. I think that would face substantial opposition from DC itself, let alone the small but growing chunk of libertarian or social minded politicians. This isn't like the MPAA or whatever, where your average politicians might think you're talking about rafting if you speak about torrenting.
>AdNauseam 'clicks' Ads by issuing an HTTP request to the URL to which they lead. In current versions the is done via an XMLHttpRequest (or AJAX request) issued in a background process. This lightweight request signals a 'click' on the server responsible for the Ad, but does so without opening any additional windows or pages on your computer. Further it allows AdNauseam to safely receive and discard the resulting response data, rather than executing it in the browser, thus preventing a range of potential security problems (ransomware, rogue Javascript or Flash code, XSS-attacks, etc.) caused by malfunctioning or malicious Ads. Although it is completely safe, AdNauseam's clicking behaviour can be de-activated in the settings panel.
Isn't this easily detectable? XHRs are easily detectable through various headers, so it's trivial to filter out the fake traffic from this with a few lines of code. I'd expect any ad network worth their salt to implement this. Failing that, thanks to ad fraud there's a whole industry of bot/ad fraud detection firms using browser fingerprinting and behavioral analysis to detect fake ad clicks. I have no doubt that an extension that's "clicking" on every ad using XHR is going to get detected and filtered. I'm very skeptical using this extension will ever achieve its policy goals of fighting against adtech or whatever. You might as well attach a "DNT: 1" header to all your requests.
I'm not sure what headers you're referring to, but it would be easy for a browser extension to open urls Ina way that would be indistinguishable from a user click. That said, it should be fairly straightforward for ad networks to detect large numbers of clicks from a given device and treat it as bot traffic.
>it would be easy for a browser extension to open urls Ina way that would be indistinguishable from a user click.
If they actually opened the page as a tab and rendered it, it would be pretty convincing. However, they specifically decided only to send one XHR request, which is easy to detect because a bunch of behaviors associated with normal browsing (eg. loading css fonts, javascript) doesn't get executed.
Yes, the way they've decided to do it, it would be easy to detect. But nothing would stop an extension from loading the initial page, loading any resources from it, etc., without displaying it to the user. (Not that many people would want to run such an extension, since it would slow their browsing for no benefit.)
It gives them money in the short term but it costs their clients money and makes the service overall less valuable. If everyone installed this it would basically wreck the online ads industry overnight.
But if only a few people install it then it's just a little bit more money taken from advertisers and given to ad companies. The tiny number of people who would actually consider installing an extension like this aren't going to substantially impact the perceived value of online advertising.
I think one should be careful using the term "click fraud" in this context. Someone who installs this extension doesn't in my mind qualify to be defrauding anyone. There is no contract in place, it isn't against the law to express interest in a product, and there's no technical controls being breached illegally as the browser is just sending a request to a server.
And this is why Google is speculating to integrate WEI on Google Chrome and business owners and advertisers are going to gladly welcomeand implement it and pressure web developers to do the same on their websites. Just because there's no direct defrauding going on, doesn't mean ad networks aren't noticing and accounting for it.
> Someone who installs this extension doesn't in my mind qualify to be defrauding anyone.
Bluntly, it doesn't matter what you or I think -- what matters is what politicians, police, prosecutors and judges think.
I don't see anything on the main github page that says the extension is intended to cause harm to the advertisers or the website, but IME governments have often not cared.
And when 1M people in a country install the extension, are they acting independently or as a group? One person protesting may be legal, 1M organizing may not be protected.
The U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Resource Manual Section 941.18 U.S.C. 1343 cites these as the key elements of wire fraud: “1) that the defendant voluntarily and intentionally devised or participated in a scheme to defraud another out of money; 2) that the defendant did so with the intent to defraud; 3) that it was reasonably foreseeable that interstate wire communications would be used; and 4) that interstate wire communications were in fact used.”
Since the ad agencies are the ones benefiting monetarily from this alleged fraud, would that not mean that they would be bringing about a case against themselves?
The problem is it does not destroy the model of annoying ads, it jsut makes it less profitable for publishers. It works like an auction, which is that advertisers place bids. assuming there are lots of fraudulent clicks, advertisers would notice a lower conversion rate, which would hurt ROI and advertisers would adjust by lowering bids, so the problem sorta corrects itself by adjusting to a new equilibrium of profitability. the only one hurt are the publishers and ad networks like meta/alphabet who earn less. but the evidence only shows higher ad rates despite this, not less.
I don't personally run this extension (because I've read that the fraudulent clicks are easy to detect) but supposing that the clicks from this extension were both pervasive and indistinguishable from real clicks, it would seem to me that that would cause ROI to asymptotically approach zero which would result in the collapse of ad networks as a viable business model.
Unfortunately it just leads to more ads. 20 years ago we had way fewer ads on typical sites, today you can hardly find the text in between the ads on your average news site.
It gives the networks money but it also hurts the companies actually running the ads, which would disincentivize them to do it at all, and the networks will only make more money if companies don't see a decrease in pay off for clicks and reduce their offers/stop running ads through that service altogether.
That being said realistically this is too niche for nearly enough people to run it to make any significant difference on the scale of the networks themselves, it'll just obfuscate your tracking a little.
It raises the cost per conversion, but whether that will translate to fewer ad-spend dollars isn’t clear to me. Maybe they will increase their budgets to maintain the same conversion numbers.
There was also an interesting Freakonomics episode on whether ads work at all. The incentives for advertising aren’t exactly rational. What’s good for a company isn’t always good for an individual working in the ads department of that company. Plus, the money is often there whether it works or not, and advertising departments will always insist that they do.
I used this for a while. It generates a gallery of all the ads that you “click” on which is quite entertaining. It’s interesting to see what ads come up based on what it clicks.
It took me a long time to come around to using ad blockers. For a long time, my feeling was, "if you don't like ads don't use the web. You owe it to those websites to look at their ads".
But then the ads just go so resource intense that I came around and finally installed an ad blocker.
This however still feels one step too far. The ad blocker protects me from the resource utilization of ads. But if you're already blocking the ads, then the tracking shouldn't work anyway.
How do you justify using their resources unnecessarily? Doesn't something like this make you no better than the advertiser?
I don't use AdNauseam but I have been thinking about it more lately, not out of malice but because I wonder if it's simply a more efficient way of preventing trackers from learning about me than by standard blocking. I am concerned no amount of blocking is going to cut it, and there will always be little leaks of my data. If I stop trying to hide from them and instead jam their systems with as much noise as possible, maybe they will have less useful information about me than if I continue to hide while dropping inevitable, accidental breadcrumbs.
Have you ever considered the corollary?
Speaking TO the ad networks..
"If you dont like strangers clicking on ads, may be consider not presenting the ads to them?"
I'm perfectly fine with a blog author carrying a banner on their domain advertising for a service that paid for thier blog post. What I'm NOT fine with is a blog post carrying an ad served by a tracking company that wants to know who I am, what my interests are, and how to get me to buy more things I dont need. If a blog presents such ad, they deserve to be fired upon.... by tools like Ad nauseum IMO. It is only fair.
I didn't say I agree on these ideologies. I actually support the website owner's legal right to not serve users with ad blockers who don't pay in any other way.
I think using the cultural stigma of a "terrorist act" to make an analogy like that isn't very productive.
It's as effective as saying "People also do bad things for ideological reasons", simply stating as fact that violating copyright is bad ignoring any of the nuance that was provided.
Violating copyright doesn't actively harm the copyright holder. Clicking on ads consumes actual real world resources of the ad network (which is passed on to the advertiser). This is basically stochastic terrorisim on a small scale.
I confused what you were referring to, but I think it works with either adnauseum or copyright.
I'm not sure what your definition of terrorism is. It sounds like it's defined as stealing resources from someone else?
The definition of terrorism is not very defined, but I would think it generally means to cause fear in the general public for political gains. Maybe the general public can be replaced by an ad network theft induces fear, but then I think we're on vague territory.
I think for me the main point is just that harm can be justified for good and bad reasons, so we have to discuss how it's harmful and why it's justified or vice versa, rather than just saying it's harmful therefore bad.
In general I'm for "harming" businesses that I believe are actively harming society. I would be more on the side of trying to target their incentives rather than any individual person though. Sanctions, penalties and tax disincentives supposedly do this.
There's no such thing as stochastic terrorism. It's an imaginary problem invented by people looking for a plausible excuse to restrict freedoms that they don't like.
Your intellectual inconsistency is amusing. You believe in intellectual property but not stochastic terrorisim, even though both are just created concepts to explain things that people believe exist.
That is a truly bizarre thing to say. Do you believe that everything with a name exists? If I say the words "the great replacement" does that mean that it actually exists? If I say "COVID-19 lab leak" does that confirm the truth of that theory too?
I tried saying "my enormous wealth" a few times, but I'm still not enormously wealthy. Do you have any tips for how I can learn to make things true just by referring to them?
To be more serious: "stochastic terrorism" is nonsensical because it attributes to a person some act that is not his responsibility. It doesn't matter how large your audience is or what you suspect they might do with the information: saying "this hospital performs masectomies on teenage girls" will never be a terrorist act, even if some audience member allegedly called in a bomb threat later. In no way, shape, or form is that act attributable to him. If you say something, and someone reacts by doing something, that is not your fault, and never will be.
A lot of nefarious, brutal and unethical behaviour that is completely normalised in today's world will be considered terrorist or otherwise in the future. It is still ideological no matter how horrible we think it is.
The point of ublock is not just eliminating tracking but also to radically reduce resource use on a page from abusive marketing.
Cutting out 200+ objects, some with significant overhead, on a lower powered device or low bandwidth or long ping time like overseas can completely change a browsing experience from intolerable to completely acceptable.
Clicking ads would defeat the whole point and require all resources to be loaded.
However some day if politicians take enough money from the powers that be and make laws requiring all ads to load, this would be a good alternative to have. (However then they'd ban automated clicking)
Online advertising industry is at the point of negative externality. If everyone is blasting ads to users, the effectiveness of each ad goes down, and thus an advertiser need to blast even more ads. All this is at decreased quality of user experience and increased resource serving ads (screen real estate, servers, developer hours) while the economic efficiency (matching willing sellers and buyers) is no longer increased. In other words, between online advertisers, it is a zero sum game -- there are only so many willing buyers' eyeball-hours.
It's difficult to imagine how to end this negative (externality) spiral. A legal ban on online ads could reduce drastically, but that is throwing the poor baby out with the bathwater. I wonder if something like phantom clicking ads could tip the economic scale for advertisers such that it is no longer cost effective for them to blast ads at people.
There is a serious game theoretic optimization going on in this trillion-dollar field (and I worked in this field before) and a novel tech or paradigm can change the game completely.
> if everyone is blasting ads to users, the effectiveness of each ad goes down, and thus an advertiser need to blast even more ads.
Things have really gone full circle now. If I visit a site (happens rarely) that has a clean design and puts all the ads into a plain column down one side of the page, I'm pretty sure I'm more likely to look at those ads than I am on the typical crappy site where I need to swat away ads like blowflies off a horse turd just to begin to see the underlying content.
Advertising is not zero sum because a company can choose to keep money rather than pay for a marginal ad, which may be more profitable. Microeconomics indicates that increased per-unit costs to suppliers (advertisers) decreases quantity sold. I'm not sure I understand your argument for why this would not apply.
Although, I will note that giving advertisers disinformation resulting from adnauseam loads is probably a much more significant effect than the cost of serving additional bytes.
The whole online ad industry is based on users honestly clicking on ads so that advertisers get some sort of feedback as to its effectiveness. If extensions are silently clicking on ads, it renders ad metrics and tracking completely irrelevant.
I have never really understood AdNauseam. I understand it clicks all ads so there would be no useful tracking profile that way.
But if you have an adblocker and tracking protection like in uBlock Origin and Firefox, it feels it then does not make any sense. You would just send alot of data to trackers, even if its just garbage, and it would just waste your broad band. It clicks on things that would be blocked with an adblocker.
My question is, make AdNauseam any sense when you block ads and trackers (use uBO and Firefox (Strict Enhanced Tracking Protection)? Or is it just useful if you want to have ads, but not want to be profiled by trackers?
I don’t want ads at all and will not click on them, but if I had to choose, I would rather have a non-personalized ad, because it is less likely to have been produced by violating my privacy.
Adnauseam does not achieve the goal, but I know how to fix it. First of all, clicking every ad is easily detectable. People should click occasionally, but from many devices/IPs. It is not achievable with low number of users -> bootstrapping problem. Bootstrapping can be solved by incentivising users.
Consider this scheme:
- A marketplace for fraud clicks advertised as a way to ditch competitors
- Anyone can pay a fee and point to a certain ad that must be fraud-clicked
- Users with an extension will be directed to this ad in background, lust like Adnauseum does
- They will receive a fraction of the fee
This scheme could bring in missing economic incentives for the users.
> If everybody used it, it would kill the industry.
Fingerprinting and click fraud detection says NO!
Seriously, are we in 2000s where ad platforms couldn't detect malicious patterns and fake clicks and I could join a ad click group on facebook to make 100s of dollars?
Even in a case of everyone using an adblock, do you think they're not going to serve ads through first party domains making it very difficult to block? There are already ad companies who do this through their CDNs. why are the supposed users of "Hacker News" site oblivious to these things?
> why are the supposed users of "Hacker News" site oblivious to these things?
Because some people on this site aren't hackers and aren't even technical. They're from old media and are looking for "useful people" to help take down Google and Facebook.
Think Rupert Murdock browsing here globbing onto any anti-tech thread with the understanding of a typical 80yo.
One that has us pay for websites would be far better. Including services like Gmail and such. We would be paying customers, not eyeballs for sale, and only websites deemed worthy of that level of loyalty would survive.
Any websites that prefer it could still be free then, but the costs to host them would have to be paid by their owner (like most personal or business websites today), not sponsored by ads.
You’re speaking from the position of someone clearly privileged enough to afford all the services you’d like to continue using. There are vast swaths of t people for whom an additional monthly subscription to watch YouTube, have access to email, read the news, browse social media, etc just isn’t financially tenable.
Especially in the year 2023 where technology and internet access is so crucial to survival, I’d prefer for a low-income family to not have to choose between a meal and renewing their monthly email subscription.
>You’re speaking from the position of someone clearly privileged enough to afford all the services you’d like to continue using.
No, I'm speaking from the position of someone who believes we should use fewer (or even no) services, be it Gmail, or Figma or Spotify free tier, or whatever.
There's always FOSS software. There's also freemium (no ads, just reduced functionality to lure someone to the premium full-featured version), and of course freeware.
Ad-supported also has a cost: the ad-induced consumerist spending is one of the biggest expenses people make (disproportionaly so for poorer people). And there's also the jacking up of product costs to cover an ad budget. Plus the social cost in multitude of ways (from the advertisers having influence over the service provider, to personal data being harvested and sold).
This is a good thing. By requiring paid access to more websites, you might find there’s less people spewing garbage in comments sections etc, since they can’t really afford a bunch of accounts to just troll around.
You know how you pay for cable, and Hulu, and Netflix, and still have to sit through ads? It would be like that. If I'm going to have to watch ads anyway, I'll decline paying for the service, thanks. And go on blocking the ads.
The unlikely proposition of the GP is that a grassroots movement with browser extensions would somehow manage to overwhelm and destroy the advertising industry by rendering it unprofitable and nonsensical.
Passing such legislation would be rather redundant at that point, wouldn't it?
I might be wrong about Netflix, I have not watched it in a long time. But certainly many pay channels, pay sports networks, and pay streaming services also have ads. Sometimes skipable, sometimes not.
Wikipedia has been working just fine for decades now, without serving malware-laden ads to users. It's not our job to help trillion-dollar companies fix their business models.
Personally, I like pay-per-use and subscription models.
And I'm not entirely opposed to advertising; TV and radio have been ad supported for generations, but we've now added surveillance which is unacceptable. (The ads themselves are also more intrusive, but that's my secondary concern.)
Something I don't understand: wouldn't clicking all the ads still help build tracking profiles of you? (except, inaccurate ones, which still carry the chance of harming you?)
They seem to compare themselves to TrackMeNot, which Googles random things in the background to try to mess up Google's profile of you — but I always thought that sounded crazy, because what if it looks up stuff that gets you put on a list, or stuff that's outright illegal? I tried looking at the TrackMeNot paper but it 404's.
Another question I have about AdNauseam: people seem to think that if we succeed in abolishing tracking, the web will still be free, just with non-tracking ads. I don't buy that, because ads aren't very profitable as it is. We might end up with wide swaths of the web just paywalled (or worse? If we get to that point, there'll be lots of "innovations" I'm sure). Why don't people demonstrate what a better model would look like, and whether it would work at scale, if they really dislike the current state of the web?
This may not be the best title, it's the desired function of the add-on to generate noise and making tracking and targeting less useful. There is nothing hidden about what it is doing for the user.
Yes, I think that this title should be changed to reflect that this is the intended behavior. Like "AdNauseam: uBlock Origin fork that automatically click ads on behalf of users"
s/fork silently clicking ads on behalf of users/fork defending users by silently clicking ads
I came here with the revised title assuming malicious intent from the fork. I now know thats not how it works. So my title rename is just a suggestion to further clarify the intent. hth
AdNauseam – clicking ads so you don't have to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34886300 - Feb 2023 (69 comments)
AdNauseam – clicking ads so you don't have to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25043165 - Nov 2020 (11 comments)
AdNauseam: Browser extension to fight back against tracking by ad networks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20048216 - May 2019 (63 comments)
AdNauseam – clicking ads so you don't have to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19278936 - March 2019 (164 comments)
Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15112524 - Aug 2017 (246 comments)
AdNauseam – Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109251 - Aug 2017 (174 comments)
AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327228 - Jan 2017 (329 comments)
AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13222733 - Dec 2016 (276 comments)
AdNauseam Browser Extension: Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611594 - Nov 2015 (72 comments)
Ad blocker that clicks on the ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8515398 - Oct 2014 (238 comments)